Influence of multiple dynamic factors on the performance of myoelectric pattern recognition

Hand motion classification using surface Electromyogram (EMG) signals has been widely studied for the control of powered prosthetics in laboratory conditions. However, clinical applicability has been limited, as imposed by factors like electrodes shift, variations in the contraction force levels, forearm rotation angles, change of limb position and many other factors that all affect the EMG pattern recognition performance. While the impact of several of these factors on EMG parameter estimation and pattern recognition has been considered individually in previous studies, a minimum number of experiments were reported to study the influence of multiple dynamic factors. In this paper, we investigate the combined effect of varying forearm rotation angles and contraction force levels on the robustness of EMG pattern recognition, while utilizing different time-and-frequency based feature extraction methods. The EMG pattern recognition system has been validated on a set of 11 subjects (ten intact-limbed and one bilateral transradial amputee) performing six classes of hand motions, each with three different force levels, each at three different forearm rotation angles, with six EMG electrodes plus an accelerometer on the subjects' forearm. Our results suggest that the performance of the learning algorithms can be improved with the Time-Dependent Power Spectrum Descriptors (TD-PSD) utilized in our experiments, with average classification accuracies of up to 90% across all subjects, force levels, and forearm rotation angles.